History Essays

Narrated by the visionary founding member, Hell's Angel provides a fascinating all-access pass to the secret world of the notorious Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sonny Barger recounts the birth of the original Oakland Hell's Angels and the four turbulent decades that followed. Hell's Angel also...

In Tales from the New Jersey Devils Locker Room, former New Jersey goalie Chico Resch and coauthor Mike Kerwick bring listeners along for a wild ride from the lean early seasons to the three Stanley Cup championships of this beloved team.

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the best-selling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.

Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. April recommended reading by the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Goodreads, Jezebel, Christian Science...

Tales from the Indiana Hoosier Locker Room covers over a century of Indiana University basketball. Current and former Hoosiers talk of the excitement, the disappointment, and the celebration that has turned IU basketball into a statewide religion. The history of the Indiana program is revealed through the memories of the school’s hundreds of lettermen. Without a doubt, this is a must-listen for every March Madness and college basketball fan.

In Tales from Augusta’s Fairways, Jim Hawkins, who covered his first Masters in 1968, takes listeners behind the high, thick hedges of Augusta National Golf Club for an intimate, entertaining glimpse of the classic cathedral that is home to golf’s most enchanting event. Tales from Augusta’s Fairways takes an inside look at the greats, the amateurs, and the underdogs who have made the Masters the most revered, prestigious golf tournament in the world.

The pro football season of 1963 was dominated by the unexpected. In April, months prior to the beginning of play, it was revealed that two All-Star players, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, were gambling on the sport and would be suspended from play for at least a year. Even worse, in May, one of the league’s bigger-than-life personalities, Big Daddy Lipscomb, was found dead, with police saying he perished from a heroin overdose, something those who knew him best still dispute.

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

Longlisted for the National Book Award Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Shortlisted for the 2025 Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Memoir A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER High Plains Book Award FINALIST for the Writers’ Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy FINALIST for the Indigenous Voices Award Longlisted for the First Nation Communities READ A bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary...

In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....

Anarchism claims that there's no need for a state and that it would be better to have a society without central government. Anarchists dislike the authority of the state, but the dream of the stateless society is not a simple matter.

“[A]nother hilarious essay collection from Phoebe Robinson.” —The New York Times Book Review “Strikes the perfect balance of brutally honest and laugh out loud funny. I didn’t want it to end.” —Mindy Kaling, New York Times bestselling author of Why Not Me? With sharp, timely...

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile...

Ohio coaching legend Paul Brown said he wanted to create "the New York Yankees of pro football" when he assembled the Cleveland Browns from scratch in 1946. Despite his ambition, not even the future Hall of Fame coach could have foreseen ten league championship appearances and seven titles in the team's first ten years.

These are essays on medieval history, and the crusades especially, written from what can broadly be considered a Marxist approach.

This is an extensive collection of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis that have been brought together in one volume for the first time. As well as his many books, letters, and poems, Lewis also wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on various ethical issues and on the nature of literature and storytelling. In this essay collection we find a treasure trove of Lewis' reflections on diverse topics.

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world “The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more...